Google Video improves?

In my original YouTube vs. Google Video test, YouTube came out way ahead. The one thing that was really killer for me is that Google took days, in one case weeks, to 'verify' a video that I had uploaded. The need to wait an extended period was so... anti-Web. There were also plenty of other features missing, like tagging, commenting, and rating -- features that help generate a community around a pool of videos.

The Google Video team has seemed to take note of YouTube's feature lead and has sent out a mass e-mail detailing all their new features. Everything listed here has been available on YouTube, which goes to show how deficient GVideo was, but now, in a bulleted list at least, Google Video is looking more on par with YouTube. One area they might surpass YouTube is something they haven't released yet: sharing in ad revenue for the videos that you post. Whether this is text ads hosted on the side of your video or video ads before/after your clips, I have no clue. While the opportunity to make money off little videos is attractive, I'm less excited by the idea that I might have to watch more video ads (note: there is no indication that Google is going to do this type of ad, I'm just specuating).

Here's a list of the new features (in their own words, as I have neither the videos nor the time to try this out):
* Instant gratification: A web-based video uploader for immediate upload and playback
* Share your video with the world, or maybe just your friends: Single-click video posting
to popular blog services, including MySpace and Blogger
* Get involved!: Now add ratings, tags, and comments for all videos
* Zeit-what? Now you can see a "Top 100" list,
updated daily, that shows what people are watching
* It's "Football", not "Soccer": Google Video now exists in the UK, France, Germany,
Italy, Spain, Canada, Poland, and the Netherlands

Comments (2)

You can embed Google Videos on other sites, right? What if you got ad revenue whenever your video was played anywhere: Google Video's page plus any page where your video is embedded that runs adwords. The fun, after all, of this stuff is that you can post it wherever you want, and surely Google can track that.

Hadn't thought about that -- interesting idea/model. It definitely encourages you to set your videos free, though the accounting will be a little difficult: if your cut comes out of the revenue that the page owner would have gotten, they won't want to embed the video, and if it doesn't, then Google will have to worry about the ability to double book revenue (i.e. embed your own Google Video on every page to get double money). As long as they can detect double booking and are willing to sacrifice an extra bit of ad revenue, then it sounds like a great idea. I have a feeling though that a lot of the video ad revenue may come down to video ads, as I don't imagine the click-throughs on text ads are very high in this case (I have absolutely no data for this claim).